Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Paint Scrapings

Yesterday, I was able to stop down at the CTM during my lunch at work to scrape some more paint off of a panel on the north side of the Montreal Tramways Car 2056/Springfield Street Railway Car 575. While looking through the layers scraped off, it is apparent that there were some repairs made to the side of the car at one point with a bondo type substance. Most of the work seen in the pictures has been done by Galen Semprebon and Xian Clere.

Looking at the numbers closely, one can see the original numbers on the car. The white paint is the Montreal paint colors. We are scraping down to the yellow/gold which was the Springfield (MA) Street Railway colors. Between the red '2' and the '0', a red '5' is faintly visible on the yellow paint. After the '0', we have uncovered the '7' and on the right edge of the picture, another 5 is barely discernible. We plan to trace the numbers and then see if we can uncover the numbers better and trace them again.

The picture on the right is a date that Xian uncovered (7-10-53) with an word above it starting with "NA". Above that on a lower layer of paint is a date in 1949. This is located on the left side vestibule door side post on one end of the car. Any thoughts?

About this Site

"Connecticut Company" is NOT an official blog of the Connecticut Trolley Museum. The articles posted within this site are the views of the contributors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organization.

This blog site is named after the original Connecticut Company or ConnCo, which ran trolleys throughout Connecticut from 1910 to 1948. ConnCo was a subsidy of the New Haven Railroad. By 1948, ConnCo converted all trolley operation to buses, and the era came to a close in Connecticut.

However, eight years prior, in 1940, the Connecticut Electric Railway Association was formed in an effort to preserve a streetcar from Hartford. In 1941, CERA saved its first car, ConnCo 65 from the scrapper. When trolley service ended in 1948, CERA saved 7 more ConnCo cars.

Today, the Connecticut Trolley Museum is the oldest incorporated museum dedicated to railway preservation in the country. Although not the largest, CTM's has a collection covering many of the major types of trolley cars including streetcars, interurbans, elevated cars, and work cars from the Northeast, Midwest, Deep South and Internationally as well.